Bulger Killer Jon Venables is back to put the Government on trial

JON Venables is back in the news. One of the two boys who murdered James Bulger, aged 2, is the subject of the Sun’s front-page story:

“Bulger killer’s secret release”

He’s out? The newspaper report begins:

“A feared plot to free James Bulger’s killer…”

So. Venables is not of prison. He’s inside. What’s the fear?

On Page 5, we learn:

JAMES Bulger’s enraged family hit out last night at a feared cover-up over his depraved killer Jon Venables being freed. They claim a parole bid by the brute — released with a new identity but locked up again for having child abuse images — has been “shrouded in secrecy”.

Go on:

Horrified dad Ralph Bulger, whose two-year-old was snatched and mercilessly tortured to death by Venables and a pal when the pair were just ten, branded it “shameful”.

This pal was called Robert Thompson.

Venables, now 30, was back on the streets after serving less than eight years for James’s murder when he was caught with the sick images on his computer — flouting the terms of his life licence. He was caged for two years — and six weeks ago Ralph made an impassioned plea at a parole hearing not to let him out.

The shattered father, 46, has heard nothing since and fears his words fell on deaf ears — with the “sick, predatory child-killer” poised to walk free at any moment, if he has not done so already.

“I can’t help but fear the worst — that he is set to be free, which is why everyone is trying to keep it hushed up to the last minute. The only reason there will be a media furore is if there is something for the public to be angry about.”

Adding:

“Six weeks is a long time for the parole board to deliver their decision. I’m terrified that it indicates plans are being made for his release. Even more terrifying is the thought that he may already have been released from jail and we just don’t know it yet.”

James Bulger was murdered in a sickening crime. His killers’ lives and deeds ever since have been shrouded in secrecy. But this is still a story because it became politicised as soon as Tony Blair sought to make gain from it. It was the arch manipulator who described the killing of a two-year-old by two ten-year-olds as a “hammer blow struck against the sleeping conscience of the country, urging us to wake up and look unflinchingly at what we see”. Adding that “if we do not learn and then teach the value of what is right and what is wrong, the result is simply moral chaos, which engulfs us all”.

Blair would fix “broken Britain”. And then came David Cameron to take that phrase and run with it. So. When a powerless man whose son was ripped from him in brutal fashion says in the Sun“I cannot help but be suspicious — and question what the Government has to hide”, he can be sure that Cameron and the political elite will repsond. They will use him to look tough on crime.

When Mr Justice Morland said Thompson and Venables serve a minimum recommended sentence of eight years, then Tory home secretary Michael Howard raised their sentence to 15 years. The courts said that was unjust. After the Bulger murder, New Labour published No More Excuses: A New Approach to Tackling Youth Crime in England and Wales. In it, Blair’s New Labour project were now the party tough on crime. They proposed abolishing doli incapax, the rule that people under 14 were ‘incapable of crime’. Venables and Thompson were 11 when they were tried in an adult court for murder.

Laws were changed.

The Sun’s scare story is not about the child, the perpetrators and the victims. It’s about politics and power. And that’s sick.